So on the outside we have a heavy-duty mining / industrial area. Then we go down a couple of elevators to reach an office-style research center with no offices or places for people to work. Then there’s a testing arena where they test landmines by blowing up pigs in an enclosed chamber. Then we have to descend a massive silo where people are doing biotech research. (How far underground are we by now?) Then we go down yet another elevator to the chamber where Victoria was being held. Then we go up a ladder to a wrestleman show.

Does this audience go through the research silo to get to the show? No? How did they get Victoria out of this lab without going past us? Did they drag her out through the arena? Isn’t this mine / office / lab in the middle of the desert? Is it next to a public place? How did the Patriot’s RV get into the area where he’s training?

The problem here is that it makes no damn sense to chain these environments together like this. In a world designed by a non-lunatic, each zone would be an isolated mission. However, then there would be no reason to visit the mine or the wrestleman show, since the only reason we visit those places is to get in and out of the lab.

A detail I didn’t notice until now: The Patriot RV is parked outside the hotel, meaning 47 must have crossed BACK through the arena to steal it?

Still, Mumbles is right. This part feels a little funny and self-aware. If they could have grasped that tone and ran with it they might have wound up with something that was fun and funny. It would probably still be offensive to long-time Hitman fans, but at least it would be able to stand on its own merits.

Anyone else having problems when trying to play the video embeded in the blog instead of via the youtube link?Because the last 5 (I think) videos I had weird stuttering whenever I tried to use the embeded video in full screen.

Yeah. When I first played the game, I could not figure out how to stealthily take out the Patriot in order to steal his costume.

It’s actually a pretty fun level, since you have this whole area you can walk around in freely without a costume. Without the silly wrestling match QTE, it’s one of the closest levels to something akin to what you’d see in Blood Money.

However, the wrestling QTE, despite all the weird shit, is the easiest way to get Silent Assassin in The Arena. Without that conversation (in much the way I played it), you go to the courtroom without any real reason to. It feels as strange as needing to kill those scientists.

After overhearing Sanchez from the vent, you emerge in a hallway leading to the arena crowd, where Sanchez and the luchador Generico are fighting. I don’t know where you get the proximity mine, but if you use the keycard, you can’t get inside the fighting ring, and must walk amongst the crowd.

Yeah, this. You can either do it the ‘easy’ stealthy silent assassin way (Become the American Luchadore named Patriot, take off your mask in front of a crowd and a dozen guards, kill Sanchez, put on mask, leave.) to get the information or you can use the keycard and overhear it in the vents.

The proximity mine on that level Shamus remembers was either Armed Explosives or the C4 which acts like Proximity Mines when thrown. (Pops up a timer, goes boom.) And the top of the cage is open, so you can toss it in from above.

Funny enough, this is one of the few times when the game makes *sure* you hear information that sets up the next level. (Unlike the talk of the big Sanchez fight and the last scientist you kill yelling at the others about how Sanchez took Victoria from him, which is why you were suddenly there.) Which is why the next level is not at all related to the Sheriff but instead a random hotel in the middle of nowhere. Because damned if they haven’t mastered incoherent scene transitions.

I’ve never actually played any of them, but it seems as though the series has always had a slightly goofy aspect, and perhaps some level of self-awareness. I’m thinking mainly of the Easter eggs, I guess – stuff like this (NSFW language):

Wait…This crappy motel that has a rusty half a shower,without a curtain even,has fucking REINFORCED CONCRETE WALLS?!?!No wonder hitman was protected from that ARMOR PIERCING ROCKET by that fucking bunker wall.

Dear god,that nun cutscene.Its way shorter than the one you guys ranted about,but it is filled with equal amounts of stupidity.

It might be no win situation for realism. Thin plywood wall might not be enough to detonate the grenade on impact, it’s designed to hit armor after all. It should detonate after 9 seconds whether it hits something or not, but it would be 9 seconds of being awkwardly embedded in the wall. On the other hand, thick reinforced concrete on a merely 2 storey high building…

If they made plywood walls,the rocket would probably explode in the bathroom or somewhere like that,so it would maybe be better for 47.Plus seeing a rocket fly through the wall in slow motion before it explodes would make the scene cooler.Though it wouldnt leave all this rubble.

Where does all of this crap come from anyway?It looks like a whole building collapsed,not a single room.

Maybe the extra rubble was from the single floor above? Which, given how buildings, environments and geography work in this game, likely consisted of a police station, a spooky crypt, a pet shop, and the Eiffel Tower.

What! That’s the best most ridiculous string of environments I’ve ever seen.

It’s so hard to imagine how this even got made. And it makes the story even stupider :p Because it’s not even like they had been given a string of levels that all fit each other and told to make a story that links them in a way which makes sense.

They were given a bunch of levels that only made sense if they were different locations being visited by a hitman. And it just so happened the name of the game was ‘Hitman’.

And then! They didn’t do that and instead they wrote “oh but actually he’s only passing through the golf club so he can use the golf club’s ladder to climb into the police station, where you can get down into the dungeons where the entrance to the night club is so he can save the girl.

Oh and I guess as he’s passing through he kills this random NPC I just picked out because he’s a hitman”

I’d add “Developing credible threats” to the list. Aside from his size, there is nothing about the fight suggesting why we lost the first time we dealt with Trejulk, except that he had “It just happened, ok?” cutscene power. Since it’s all quicktime in this fight, if you do it right you can wreck him completely like Josh did and you have no reason to suspect you couldn’t have always done that. There was no “drug him before the the fight” option, he couldn’t lay a hand on you, and you broke his neck despite all that muscle with less effort than when you turn a wheel lever. They didn’t even show him ripping apart some other fighter.
Come to think of it, is there any part of this game where they actually show Sanchez fighting before 47’s QTE? He yells and 47 flys through a door in the one scene, but that merely suggests fighting happened. Do they ever show anything?

Same with the nuns. For all the buildup of mooks chatting about them, the cutscene calling them in, and them blowing up your room, they might as well have been wandering guards for all the effort it took to kill them.

It’s simple. The same thing happened to Hitman Absolution that happened to Dark Souls 2: the dev team split into smaller teams, each responsible for one level, without really knowing what (if any) the larger story context would be. The overall “we want to be a grindhouse movie” direction mandates that the game take place in a single unbroken world, so they stitched the levels together in rough order of difficulty and put some loading corridors in between. The writer and her cutscene team was told to make it work, regardless of how stupid the transition was.

From Software has a wonderfully honest interview where they talk about how the game was in a serious development tailspin, it was almost cancelled, and they had to assemble the game out of the surviving levels at the last minute. So you have the famous elevator up from the top of the highest tower to the bottom of an active volcano. It was a hidden volcano!

Can you link this interview? It sounds quite interesting, and if that was really the case then its somewhat impressive that Dark Souls 2 was as good as it was (which imo it was quite good, just a disappointment when compared to its predecessors).

Wow,agnija radoncic.Her parents must reeeeeaaally love old traditions,because I cannot conceive of anyone born in the last 50 years having that name.Especially odd when her sister has the way more common name dijana.

To put it in perspective for the rest of you,thats like having brothers tom and jebediah.

There were a pair of brothers in the NFL about a decade ago named Jerome and Stockar. I don’t know what motivated the MacDougals to name their kids that way, but “Aerith and Bob” names really do happen within the same family.

About the layout of this place,it gets even stupider once you realize that the hangar with the rv seems to open to outside.

So,we have this mountain ring surrounding this building,with a road curving around one mountain,and a mine going through the mountain,connecting the two parts of the road between the bends.Then the road,and the other side of the mine,open to the building(which is surrounded by mountains)that has multiple underground levels.Then,in the deepest bowels of this building we have a hangar that opens to outside,presumably on the other side of another mountain.Ummmm….what the hell?

Also,why didnt we question any of the scientists,some of which presumably did some tests on the girl,but we rather tried interrogating the body guard?The body guard for the guy who,as far as we know,never visited the girl in person,and probably only sent other people to experiment on her.Meaning the body guard probably didnt even hear where the girl is,let alone been there.

“Then,in the deepest bowels of this building we have a hangar that opens to outside,presumably on the other side of another mountain.Ummmm….what the hell?”

Unless you take into account, that the hangar is at the end of a ladder 47 had to climb up to get to it. It’s in the episode. Granted it’s only a small scene, but at least they hint at it, that he ascended to get to it. So that hangar can be simply at surface level anywhere on the vast compound that the Dexter Fella seems to own.

If you check the windows of the hangar during the whole thing, you can see light consistent with moonlighted nightsky coming in.

I just think it’s just not well communicated that the Hangar is all the way back up.

I’ll give the game this on Victoria: So far she has not been trapped in any situation I would reasonably expect her to be able to escape from. I mean, she was on a long road trip, but nothing about her has exactly radiated the capacity to single-handedly beat an armed gang leader in a fight or evade him in totally unfamiliar territory less than a day after waking from a coma and being too sick to walk.

Also,wasnt she supposed to be female hitman?Genetically enhanced like 47?Who in the first game,after waking up on a table,murders a guard and escapes a laboratory he was grown in.Why does the female version operate differently?

Not outright, but the framing strongly implies the locket is a killswitch.

Why does the female version operate differently?

I don’t think she has actually received hitman training yet. Granted, I haven’t played the first game, so I don’t know if they imprinted the training on 47 while he was being grown, but she’s also walking around while not an adult.

Sanchez seems to be one of the better characters in the game.He doesnt say stupid shit,he isnt disgusting,he isnt sexually objectified.So Trejo would probably be ok portrayed as huge lumbering beast of a man.

Before this point, I was on the fence regarding the assassin nuns; I just hadn’t seen enough of them to judge. But after that cutscene at the Waikiki, I was totally on board, 100%. The nuns are silly, and the game knows it. It embraces how over the top this situation is: the cheery Hawaii decorations, the garish bathrobe. That part where the nuns fire the rocket launcher into 47’s room is straight out of Blues Brothers. It’s all pretty amazing.

I think this is where the developers realized that 47 is the ultimate straight man.

They should have given him a thong. Because then you can cover the genitalia if that’s going to be a problem (it shouldn’t be i don’t think. anybody know how the ESRB’s policy on nudity works?) but you can still see 47’s nice ass.

I can appreciate the silliness of this section of the game, but I found this part of the game to be a huge drag. Mostly because it seems to both take itself too seriously, yet not seriously enough.

The other thing that I noticed is that the latex nun level could be completely removed from the game, and the story would still make complete sense. The plot doesn’t advance at all in this level, and it feels like this strange detour.

I don’t know about it being a Hitman game, but I think it would be pretty funny if a game kept the 47 in a bathrobe humor for the whole way through. Maybe also have Hitman explaining things with complete seriousness to an incredulous straight man type character (Victoria maybe?).

“What the heck is that guy?” “His name is Sanchez. The rumor is that he was experimented on as a child to make him grow to his current size. He engages in showmatches as a hobby while he is providing the muscle for kingpins. All of his clothes are custom made.” “How do you know that?” “We have the same tailor.”

“47 are those… nuns coming after you?” “The Saints. Sinners through and through, as beautiful as they are deadly. People pay a fortune just to spend a single hour in their care, and they pay even more for the Saints to put their other talents to use. We actually worked together once, but now it seems one of us will have to meet our maker.”

I actually kind of like this game when it’s trying to be funny, like with the hotel level and 47 nonchalantly eating an apple while Lenny or whatever his name was is digging his own grave. I want to see 47 at a Sam’s Club having the exit person check his receipt while asking him how his shopping experience was.

I’m a former bartender and you probably don’t want to know what I’d think of doing if a customer asked for “something brown”.

Also the game stonefly sticking to the hitman mechanics while there’s a team hunting you down is absurd. You shouldn’t be penalised for non-target casualties when everyone there is there specifically to kill you.

I just want for the hotel level to have a Blood Money style newspaper article after it. I would headline with “Suicide bombers attack South Dakota.” It would just go on to explain how they shot rockets into the building and then all shot themselves, because that’s how suicide bombers work…right?

Benjamin Travis wants to track down 47 because he thinks he knows Victoria’s location and/or has Victoria with him…

…so the nuns under his orders decide to fire a rocket launcher into his hotel room. How can they get Victoria’s location from him if he’s all blown up? How do they know that Victoria isn’t in the room with him? Why does an agency that specializes in covert assassination operate in the most conspicuous way imaginable?

I mean, I’m sure the developers didn’t care about any of that, they just wanted a level where 47 assassinates bondage nuns in a partially destroyed hotel. But these cut scenes are all in direct contradiction of each other!

Josh, a friend I showed that bit too actually came up with good reason why D is the proper input for that part in the hotel. They repurposed the Vent crawling mechanic (Which is why the Lighter) and the Ledge mechanic. So from the point of view of the ledge camera, looking at the front of 47, D would be forward. From the camera angle they give you, D is literally the worst button, but cheap easy lazy mechanics reuse means they don’t care!

And Shamus, on at least hard difficulty, yes. The Civilians spot you. It’s actually very hard to save them and remain unseen if not outright impossible due to that. You have to let them die for maximum points. (Plus then you can try and hide their body in a container for extra points!)

Josh trying to climb the ledge only to hop in a box reminds me of what changed my not 100%ing AC4 Black Flag from “probable outcome” to “physical certainty”.

I was going around a fort I’d captured, grabbing chests and animus fragments because I wasn’t sick of doing so at that time, when I found one of the chests had stealth grass in front of it. I walked up to the chest and stomped it open but Kenway, instead of looting the thing, just crouched back into the stealth grass and let the chest close itself again. So I tried again. And again. Then I tried stomping from different angles which just put Kenway dead center in front of the chest again and back to square one. Then I just started hammering the stomp button over and over again, which would have been great catharsis if it wasn’t the very reason I was frustrated to begin with.

Worst part is there’s no reason for there to even be stealth grass on an island with a fort, because the only people who you would stealth from on one would be aggroed on you before you ever got a chance to get to the stealth grass.

What’s really sad about all this is that there’s only like two more “Hitman-esque” levels in the game. The rest is just the boring cover shooting/psuedo-Hitman gameplay that the game usually like trot out. :(